The present invention is in the technical filed of tennis practice boards or tennis backboards.
Tennis backboards enable tennis players to practice and improve their tennis playing skills using vertical or slanted surfaces. These tennis backboards are typically mounted to a chain fence surrounding the tennis court and tend to be very large. Some large tennis walls are also built using concrete near tennis courts. There are also portable tennis backboards available for use in the backyards or driveways. These portable tennis practice devices use a plastic or nylon net to rebound the tennis ball while a few other tennis practice devices use a flexible plastic sheet mounted on metal tubes to rebound the ball. All these devices have several disadvantages. The tennis boards mounted on fences tend to be very large and expensive and not suitable for home practice. Portable plastic net and flexible plastic sheet based practice devices have poor rebound capability. The prior art materials used for tennis ball rebound surface are plywood, wood, oriented strand board (OSB), plastic all of which have several disadvantages. Plywood, wood and oriented strand board tend to crack and warp when subjected to the elements due to high expansion and contraction due to changes in weather. Cracked and warped surfaces are not suitable for tennis ball rebound. In addition, these materials rot over a period of time. Plastic materials used for tennis backboards result in very high noise and are very expensive. Paint does not adhere well to plastic materials if they need to be painted. All these materials require very expensive way of reducing the noise from tennis ball hitting the surface such as filling the rebound unit with sand or water etc.
The present invention overcomes all the major disadvantages or the prior art tennis practice devices such as poor tennis ball rebound capability, cracking, warping and rotting of the rebound surfaces, high noise levels, high cost of noise reduction, high cost of materials used.